Chinese New Year Snake Puppets

16:50
Pippa Ainsworth
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I tend to rely on Pinterest for craft inspiration and hardly ever come up with my own ideas but last night I was thinking about Chinese New Year and the Year of the Snake and came up with the idea of making snake puppets with Bud. I was inspired by the way that the Chinese dragons dance and I wanted to replicate that movement with our puppet.

You will need:

Paper

Scissors

Crayons, pencil crayons or pens

Decorations

Glue

2 Drinking Straws

Sticky tape

First, cut a strip of paper to how long you would like your snake to be. Ours was about 50cm long and about 8cm deep. I'd suggest not making it too long as you want to make sure that the straws will hold the weight of the decorated snake. We decorated using stamps, coloured pens, crayons, pompoms and foam pieces.

When Bud was finished we added a foam tongue and a sparkly flower eye.

When you've finished decorating your snake you need to fix the drinking straws to the back of your puppet so you can make it move. I did this by turning the snake over and sticking one a few centimetres from each end of the snake.

Once you've done this you should be able to hold your snake up using the straws and make him move by moving your hands backwards and forwards.

While you aren't playing with your puppet you can stick the ends of the straws into blu-tac and it will stand up on it's own (as seen in the top photo). Ours is currently inhabiting the mantlepiece where Bud will no doubt show it to anyone who comes into the house for the next few days!

We talked a bit about China and the new year while we made our snake. At two and three quarters Bud can't quite understand but he was interested in talking about all the different animals of the Chinese calendar.